Tuesday, September 11, 2007

I feel compelled to write something.

My blogging these days has been slowed by several factors, including an increase of actual “work” to do while at work, a 12 year old who likes to play on the computer while simultaneously watching TV and playing a Gameboy, and a general sense of depression that nothing ultimately matters anyway. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen, regardless of whether anyone actually does anything or not. Certainly, beating away at a keyboard isn’t going to change much, especially in the harsh light of a readership that can truthfully be referred to as somewhere between non-existent and ethereal.

But, as I have a blog, it sort of demands some sort of care and feeding on my part. Perhaps not on a daily basis, but at least sort of a passing recognition of its existence. “Oh, crap! That’s right! I have a blog. Geez, I better go do something about that, I suppose. I’ll just check out what’s on television first. “Gilligan’s Island” on TV Land? Great! I hope it’s the headhunter episode.”

Today’s the seventh anniversary of that horrible day back in 2001. It doesn’t seem that long, although lots has happened since then. I still remember going home and sort of curling up into a fetal ball on the couch in front of the television. But today doesn’t seem to be much about that anniversary. There is a lot more attention about the Petraeus “report” in front of Congress. Lots of lights, lots of skepticism. Not much is going to change. We all know that now. One hallmark of the Bush presidency is the constant moving of the goalposts, the constant milestone just “six months down the road”. After that, everything will be crystal clear. Except that after the six months expires (also known as a Friedman Unit, or “FU”), many in the media seems to have forgotten the clarity that was supposed to emerge when Bush and his war machine asks for yet “more time”.

As many have already pointed out, just a few more “FU’s” and it will be time for Bush to leave office. At that time, Bush will be able to hand the entire mess over to the next person to inhabit the White House, and then let them take all the crap, from either or both sides, about how badly the war is going and how can we get out with a minimum of damage to everyone involved?

The next six months in Iraq are crucial -- and always will be. That noise you heard yesterday on Capitol Hill was the can being kicked further down the road leading to January 2009, when George W. Bush gets to hand off his Iraq fiasco to somebody else.

It's clear by now that playing for time is the real White House strategy for Iraq. Everything else is tactical maneuver and rhetorical legerdemain -- nothing up my sleeve -- with which the administration is buying time, roughly in six-month increments. Appearing before a joint hearing called by the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, Gen. David H. Petraeus probably won the respite Bush wanted when he said that U.S. military objectives "are in large measure being met."

Stalling, that grand old American tradition. Put off the bad things that are surely bearing down on you as long as possible. The unfortunate truth to the matter is that the United States is going to be embroiled in Iraq, and probably Afghanistan, for decades to come. This is what comes of the neocon “vision” of a limited engagement, in and out of Iraq in two months, the oil revenues will pay for the war, and there is no need for any post war planning for occupation or fighting an insurgency because it isn’t going to happen. Three months may end up being 20 years and thousands more Americans dead. And that is only the tip of the tallyboard of all the detrimental things that have happened or will happen because of the actions of George W. Bush and his gang of neocon thugs that wanted a war, regardless of the lack of a valid rationale driving the idea. They wanted a war, just because.

What a country. How the heck did we ever get to be the predominate country in the world?